When Will Christian Writing be Engaging Again?

There are lots of bugs around.

Moving from California, I knew this was going to be one of the trade offs we made. In SoCal, there are many poisonous spiders, but few bugs, no mosquitos, and not much humidity.

Last Thursday, a large one buzzed right up to my ear. Actually, it wasn’t a buzz. It was a big, heavy sound. I ducked and it dropped to the grass at the edge of the sidewalk.

It looked like a cross between an armored alien and someone’s colorful fishing tackle, with clearly defined features—eyes like black goggles, bright green armor, black and white rings around its abdomen, and black, lacy wings. It looked like something from Armageddon.

I’m not here to complain. And I’m not speaking from a position of wide research or even interest. But of all the forms of life we share this planet with, the insect realm seems most like an alien invasion.

In simplest, childlike terms, I will acknowledge that God made all the insects. But why? Many of them carry disease—malaria, plague, Lyme disease, and so forth. Why?

For that matter, most of this planet we find ourselves on seems, frankly, overly-diverse, and all too often, undomesticated. I suppose this arrangement worked until about the 1850s, when our ways of “subduing creation” became greater than creation’s ability to defend itself. I am still fearful and only able to take in a small portion of what’s here, and of that small portion, I am able to tolerate just the thinnest bandwidth. If it weren’t for the endangered species list, I’d never know how many creatures we are losing every day and will never see again.

Add to all of this what we’ve learned about the deep oceans and deep space. I can only speak for myself. When I get glimpses of this light from the Hubble telescope, words begin to fail. The same seems to go for the astronomers, who continue to use numbers to designate the “new” worlds they gaze on. We lack the rich mythological perspective of the ancient world for naming and telling stories.

When I take my gaze from them and continue to think, I begin to feel as though I have reached a new depth of depravity to continue to live in a world of the most wild and generous abundance, far beyond my own ability to imagine, and all I can do is subject it all to pest control.

I begin to think that I am not very much in step with the creator of all this.

The same seems to go for my approach to people. We—well, again, I will speak for myself—I don’t have much of a bandwidth for certain types of people, and by that I mean most types. I tire of extroverts quickly. For that matter, as an introvert, I tire of most everyone quickly.

I know I’m not alone in this. Most people live within manageable groups, like tribes. Only recently has it occurred to me to think that, for me, this narrowing might result from my own bad thinking, or bad theology. But there it is. I live a narrowed, protected existence. Most of my religious stirrings too often appear to concern conformity rather than a call to something like holiness. I certainly never seem to hear the call to celebrate Whomever is responsible for all of this wild diversity, who seems to delight in it, who won’t trouble gardens so much with potato bugs, but might allow a certain amount of infestation into a city without labeling it a judgement or a pestilence.

When I examine the limits of my own Christianity, I recognize that I feel caught between two conflicting narratives: in one, God is a creator who even invites the creation to participate in that ongoing creation. This first narrative seems to invite imagination, delight, creativity. For better or worse, we’ve continued that tradition, participating in creation that’s already there, and adding to it in art, in music, in science, and, as well, unfortunately, destruction and domination.

In the second narrative, a sad God has banned humans from a paradise but still provides a way to participate in the creation, but with disease and thorns and hard work and death thrown in.

I guess there is some realism in these narratives. There are some theologians—I’m thinking of Charles Wesley right now—who loved science and thought it was another way to learn about God. And St. Thomas Aquinas, for whom nature was one of God’s books, saw the natural world as another way to understand the divine.

19th century theories of evolution messed that up for many American and British evangelicals, gave us at least one less book to read.

It has also remade the world around us into everyday matter that we tend to ignore or look past; the world we’re in seems a range of waste that can’t tell us anything.

Gone is the writer of Proverbs who told the reader to consider the ant for moral instruction.

The thing is, though, that it seems to me that imagination and creativity should still be part of the deal for a spiritual life. And much of the time, it seems absent.

I’m not trying to over-generalize. I have many friends who read Wendel Berry and Marilyn Robinson. Some writers, like the Catholic writer Brian Doyle, have continued to explore what is harder to see—the hearts of humming birds, for example. His short piece on the tragedy of 9/11, called “Leap,” remains for me the one piece that provides both terror and redemption on the event. But I must say. Too much spiritual literature these days shows narrowness.

I don’t wish to overgeneralize here. I want to ask why Christian writing can’t explore things more. I want to ask what it can be.

I’m asking this for two reasons. First, in a few months, I will be attending a Christian writers conference, and I already know that the editors will only want a few different types of books: cozy mystery, romance, romance/mystery, Christian living books.

Have I left anything out?

The conference will.

Can we be open, maybe a bit more imaginative, more daring, more complete in our inclusion? Not for most forms of fiction, no. These are the kinds of books that sell and have an audience.

In terms of Christian living books, the writing that editors will usually ask for will try to achieve just one of two purposes.

The first is involved with changing attitudes. This may be mostly reflected in what is called devotional literature: if you are sad, here are reasons to be happy. God loves you. Be happy. Don’t be sad. God doesn’t like it when you’re sad.

The other purpose is concerned with believing the right things. The term for this is orthodoxy, which means “right opinion.” Thinking correctly about doctrines is emphasized.

I overstate this just a little bit, but let’s be clear. The emphasis is not on exploration or discovery, or making connections, or imagination, because these can all be threatening. And they can lead to wrong paths. Unfortunately for writers, this can sometimes immediately limit the horizons we may turn to, and the same can be said for artists and musicians as well. I remember reading in one of her nonfiction works the 1980s that Madeline L’Engle initially feared that her children’s book, A Wrinkle in Time, was heretical, and not based on right thinking.

I’m glad that she went ahead and published it anyway.

The second reason I have for asking all of this is, I will admit, selfish. I am about to send out a manuscript for editors to look at and make decisions on. The book is a grief memoir. I was reminded again just this past weekend that most people don’t get the grief memoir. Who is it supposed to be for? This was the first question I was asked about it.

More often, people have asked if this really is the right thing to do when you’ve lost someone? Aren’t we supposed to just get over it?

The church could be a great place for real conversations about this. It could also be a great place for holiness to break out, but as these things stand, I’m not sure that everyone would recognize it.

I’ve recently learned that we have a great deal of hope coming from a new generation of writers now who are not just trying to fit into the old patterns. They are asking questions about mental illness and conformity. They are pursuing individual paths and answering their calling as writers in powerful, new ways.

In church, I do admit to sometimes mumbling along. We recite confession and sometimes the Creed, and we learn about already familiar verses. Once in a while, for me, in that recitation, the sudden vista of a severe, distant world appears, and this shakes me a bit. I don’t know how else to say it, but it sounds and feels like stirrings of real belief. I try to navigate toward those few vistas that come. I’ve done that since I was in the fifth grade, which is why I am still trying to do this today.

I still haven’t gotten over being averse to most of the world around me. As I have admitted above, when I try to learn about God from the book of nature, I’m the first bad case. I can’t get past the Preface. But that’s me. I know that entomologists could school me on why we need moths and house flies.

My father, who was an atheist, used to challenge me on my reading of fantasy, which I considered imaginative at the time. “The world,” he said, “is such an incredible place. You don’t need to read fantasy. Just go outside.”

This was my atheist father giving unintended praise to the creator.

I saw this sign on my walk yesterday morning.

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Friends, we live in prickly times. It is easy to be taken the wrong way. So I will say this again. I mean to offend no one. As a writer, I write what I need to say, and for that I always fear I may fail in the perennial balancing act between writer, reader, and message. False signification, or signifiers that are tangled and deeply personal, can come between writer and reader. Please understand that I don’t think that most Christian writers are boring, or that I’m singling anyone out. I’m writing here of what are well established, well observed trends in the marketplaces—trends I’ve often heard writers complaining about.

As always, I value your feedback and thinking. What have you read and heard? What objections or answers would you like to offer?